Monday, April 01, 2013

An Iyengar Family

Sunday noon: I am in Triplicane, the nucleus of everything
Iyengar in Chennai.

The blazing sun has emptied the streets around the temple; only
a sprinkling of shrivelled elderly men, naked except a thin white dhoti around
their waist and the elaborate Vaishnavite mark on their foreheads, lie half-asleep
in the shade of trees or verandahs of their crumbling houses.

I am in the home of Thirumalai, whose son Ramanujam is
standing erect under the spinning ceiling fan. “Here, look,” the son tells me,
“my head is not touching the fan. But my younger brother has to duck all the
time. He is 6 feet 3, I am only six feet.”

Ramanujam may be narrowly missing the fan, but even he has
to bend each time he enters his home and goes one room to another — so low the
doors are. “Our house is like a hut, sir, the kind you see in villages. This
must be about 150 years old,” smiles Thirumalai, 57, as he watches his
strapping son demonstrate the negligible gap between his head and the spinning
blades.

Thirumalai, who works in the advertisement department of a
local paper, also grew up in such hut-like houses, including this one — all in
Triplicane — but not tall enough to have to negotiate fans and door frames. But
given his young sons’ heights and their lofty ambitions — Ramanujam, 22, wants
to be a financial analyst and his younger brother, who is 17, a fast bowler for
the Indian team — he may finally have to consider moving to a new dwelling someday.

That would also mean moving out from the nineteenth century into
the twenty-first.

Over time villages metamorphose into towns, and towns into
cities — but the bustling metropolis of Chennai, in existence for nearly four
centuries now, still holds on to its bosom small clusters of such village houses
that date back to the ancient times.

These houses are part of the agraharam, or the garland that
the humble dwellings of Brahmins have historically formed around a big temple —
in this case, the eighth-century Parthasarathy temple.

Whether these huts stick out like sore thumbs in a modern city,
or whether modernity sticks out like a sore thumb in a setting that so belongs
to a folktale — depends on which side of heritage you are in. But Triplicane is
a living museum. Changing times may have stamped out the garland-formation but
there are remnants from the holy necklace that continue to preserve the old —
lock, stock and tradition.

Thirumalai’s house is right next to the temple; and the room
we are standing in is the largest in the house, about eight feet long and five
feet wide. Aged pictures of Lord Vishnu, in his various avatars, adorn its
walls.

In Brahmin Triplicane (there is a Muslim Triplicane too,
dating back to the times of Aurangzeb) it would be sacrilege not to have his
pictures on the walls. Even greater sacrilege to display pictures of others
gods, such as Shiva. Staunch Iyengars firmly believe that Vishnu is the tallest
in the hierarchy of gods and that it is he who has appointed Shiva and Brahma
to their respective divine positions.

In the space between picture-frames are scribbled
mathematical equations and phone numbers that must remain handy. A Haier
television set, resting on a low stool, adds to the clutter. “There are eight
of us living here. My parents, me, my wife, my two sons, my sister and her
son,” Thirumalai tells me as I survey his home. A small space abutting this
room serves as the kitchen.

There must be a bathing area somewhere around — I don’t ask
where — but I know there is no toilet. The houses in this agraharam use a
common set of toilets located down the street.

We troop back to the living room, which is the only other
room in Thirumalai’s humble dwelling. In the narrow passage that connects the
two rooms sits a sleek desktop — broadband connected — on a table. It’s the
only symbol of the present in a house so symbolic of the past. The background
image on the computer screen is that of Lord Vishnu.

The living room, barely six by six, is furnished with a cot
and two chairs. I share the cot with Thirumalai’s father, who is sitting
uncomfortably upright — as if he has just recovered from a bout of coughing and
is trying to suppress another.

“How old is your father?” I ask Thirumalai.

“Eighty-three.”

“What’s his name?”

“Sthalasayanam.”

“How does he spell it?”

The young Ramanujam points to an aged nameplate, which reads:
‘Sthalasayanathuraiwar Swamy.’

“Just Sthalasayanam will do,” Thirumalai interrupts as I open
my fountain pen for the pleasure of putting it to use. “It’s one of the names Lord
Vishnu is known by.”

“When did he move in here?”

“1970,” replies a hoarse voice. The father, who I thought
was trying to suppress a bout of coughing, starts speaking. He tells me that he
was born in 1929 in Mahabalipuram and spent much of his childhood in Kancheepuram
before coming to George Town in Madras in 1942 to become a scholar in Sanskrit
and Tamil.

Sometime in the 1950’s — he is unable to recall the exact
year — he got the job of a Sanskrit teacher in a girls’ school in Triplicane. Ever
since then he has lived in Triplicane, moving into this house in 1970, even
though he went on to teach in Corporation schools across the city.

Suddenly it strikes me: in this six by six room, I am
surrounded by three generations of devout Iyengars — Sthalasayanam, 83;
Thirumalai, 57; Ramanujam, 22. What makes them family is not just the red
flowing in their veins, but also the white they are attired in. Each is wearing
a white dhoti, with a piece of white cloth thrown over bare shoulders, and the white
Y-mark on his forehead.

There are two sects of Iyengars — the Vadagalais and the
Thengalais. The Vadagalais paint a white ‘U’ on their foreheads; while the
Thengalais wear the ‘Y’ mark—they have a tiny line descending from the ‘U’ to
cover the bridge of the nose, making it resemble a ‘Y’. It is the Thengalais,
considered more orthodox, who call the shots in Triplicane.

Thirumalai explains to me the significance of the Y-mark. The
‘V’ on the forehead stands for the feet of Vishnu, while the small line descending
to the nose depicts a lotus: “the lotus feet of the lord.” And the thin red
line that runs in the middle of the ‘V’ represents goddess Lakshmi. “We wear
the mark twice a day,” Thirumalai tells me, “once in the morning, immediately
after bath, and once in the evening. It doesn’t take long, not even five
minutes.”

Wearing the Y-mark isn’t all that they do to prove their
loyalty to Lord Vishnu, who lives, in their case, just a shout away. Thrice a
day, they chant out 12 particular names of Vishnu by touching various body
parts — each name corresponding to a particular body part — and also recite the
Gayatri Mantra a minimum of 26 times, each time. And they know the Divya
Prabandham — a collection of 4,000 Vaishnavite hymns — by heart.

I ask Thirumalai if they are always dressed like priests at
home. “Always,” he emphasises, “only when I go to work do I put on a shirt on
top of my dhoti. My sons, when they go out, wear shirt and pant. But at home we
are always like this.” He seems rather proud to be living within the halo of the
temple.

“Don’t you feel cramped?” I ask him.

“At times I do. But I can’t afford a bigger house with my
salary. Here the rent is just Rs. 1,000.”

The rent is paid to a trust run by a family of Mandayam
Iyengars —they are Thengalais who traces their origins to Melkote in Karnataka.
Much of the sum collected from tenants in the agraharam is spent on maintaining
the Thengalai temple the Mandayam family has built in Ayodhya. The landlords,
says Thirumalai, have often wanted to demolish the huts and build new
structures for the tenants, “but where will we go in the meantime?”

I ask him what’s going to happen once his sons get married:
will the daughters-in-law fit into this house? He says he doesn’t know, but he
is particular about one thing, that both his sons marry girls from the Acharya
Purusha sect of Thengalais.

I turn to the young Ramanujam. I ask him if fellow students
ever made fun of the Y-mark. “Yes, initially they would tease me. But they soon
got tired of it.” I ask him if he was going to marry a girl of his father’s
choice. “Of course, without doubt,” he replies shyly.

“Will you bring your wife here?”

“I don’t think she can adjust here,” says Ramanujam, “that
is why, as soon as I get a job, I am going to take up a new house and move
there with my parents. But getting a new house in Triplicane is impossible, it
will be very expensive, so I will build a house in Kancheepuram.”

So he plans to kill two birds with one stone: Kancheepuram,
less than 80 km from Chennai, is an important seat of Vaishnavism; and that’s where
all the jobs are these days — the manufacturing plants of multinationals are
all located in Kancheepuram district.

Seventy years ago, where the jobs were in Madras, his
grandfather came to Triplicane to teach as well as to be near Lord Vishnu. And
now, Ramanujam plans to move in the reverse direction for same dual purpose.
Once he does that, life will come full circle for this devout Iyengar family.

A couple of weeks
after I met the family, in June 2012, Sthalasayanam passed away.

6 comments:

A peep into the life of a priestly family...Vadagalai- Thengalai must be North-South. I find it interesting that Iyengars from Mandya (geographically N-W of Tamil Nadu) are referred to as 'Iyengars feom the South'....

1. gayathri manthra Its 28 times (10, 28 or 108) never 26. I think your noted it down wrong. the family you met wouldve never said 262.(not a nit but FYI) People named Sthalasayanam are rarely from outside of mahabalipuram. Sthalasayanam temple is the equivalent of tricplicane temple in mahabs3. Thenkalai are not more orthodox than vadakalai :-). its the other way around.